


Hope, Again

by akiresu



Category: X-Men (Comicverse)
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-09-04
Updated: 2020-09-04
Packaged: 2021-03-07 00:01:43
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,545
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26287648
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/akiresu/pseuds/akiresu
Summary: Many years after his first meeting with Storm, the writer Phillip Halloran feels the pull of the void again.





	Hope, Again

**Author's Note:**

> This is a sequel to "Hope", the back-up story featured in Classic X-Men #11. 
> 
> Word Count: 3505  
> Estimated Reading Time: 18 Minutes

The city is cold. It isn’t Winter, it isn’t even actually cold. But it’s been cold ever since the day we met. A fire was set ablaze in my heart, but there was no fuel to burn so it quickly dwindled. My name is Phil Halloran. I am a writer, a Londoner, an insomniac, a manic depressive and I have looked into the eye of the Storm.

My memory hasn’t been the best of late. Especially with characters, subplots and all those things that are supposed to be my trade. But I remember the day we met as if it was yesterday. I remember that day I meant to die. I remember that day I chose not to. For she saved me, and I was grateful, and I would not spurn a gift. Not least a gift given unto me by a goddess, the most beautiful woman I had ever seen. Since then, the world has moved forwards, mutants like Storm have moved forwards, and even as my typewriter was replaced by a keyboard did I struggle to find the words to address the new world. What meagre words I found did well enough, be it on function or recognition, to get me by. For now, I can still call myself a writer. But a writer of meek tales, of twists stolen from stories long-forgotten and characters with all the emotional range of a photocopying machine.

I’ve climbed these stairs every week since. The same stairs of the same building where we met all those years ago. As the years have gone by, and the ownership of the tower has changed hands, sneaking up here has become an increasingly difficult affair. But, because of that, it is a kindred spirit. Despite its new dress, only itself and I remain as proof that the old city ever existed. At first, I only climbed up here to dare to hope to see her fly past once more. Occasionally some caped figure would streak through the skyline, but I never chanced to see her again. But still I came. Soon I got to wondering if I wasn’t merely sightseeing, if this habit was in fact a taunt, a threat. If I had so reneged on the gift she had given me that I would now place myself on the precipice, attempting to force her to appear in front of me once more. But then it stopped being about Storm at all. I think of her rarely now. I come up here to clear my mind of all thoughts, to gaze into the abyss and long again to return to nothingness. If it has to happen, then let it. I am tired of the wait. I long for it. To tell the truth, the only thing stopping me from death is the fear of dying. But as the days go by, and I look down from this ledge, it seems easier and easier to take just… one… step… forwards...  
I had barely moved when I heard the first crack of thunder. And as darkened clouds rolled forth, a figure came down from the sky, blocking out the sun. It was my goddess. Only it wasn’t. For my goddess could never be so angry as she was.

“You haven’t learned your lesson, Halloran?” The stranger spoke with the voice of Storm. Perhaps it really was her. “Do you mean to die?”  
No, no, no. This isn’t right. I’ve dreamed of meeting her again, and in those dreams, it never goes like this. She’s supposed to be beautiful, gentle. A peaceful arbiter of the natural world. This isn’t Storm. This is someone else, someone… terrible. I meant to respond, to even refute her, but as the words left my mouth, so too did the air strip from my lungs. The wind outside started to feel as cold as I had imagined it being. Every word of this false Storm drove chills down my arms.  
“What do you want from me? To repeat speeches delivered years since? To perform your healing for you?  
“Do not expect me to. If you need help, seek a therapist. I sensed your pain. That does not mean that I want it for myself.”  
She brought with her rain. I was soon drenched, head to toe, though she remained completely dry. I am an old man, at the end of my tether and life experiences. I didn’t know that I could still be hurt this much. “You thought me worth saving once,” I said.  
“That was then. Now your world has seen me. Cast itself at my feet, and begged for me to save it. You cannot comprehend the lives I have lived in that time. Time and time again. I have compromised, I have raged, I have killed. Killed what I have loved, even become what I have hated. I have been reborn, changed myself so many times, to worship me is to worship a many-faced goddess. But a goddess not contained by this dirt. I have fought for peoples across planets and galaxies and dimensions. And even now I lead my people into a new future. In each of these moments, the people have looked to me, to Storm, to be more than that they can hope for. And they call for me again. The starving masses crying out for succor, the bodies forcibly removed from their homes and the souls robbed of their freedom. Each would demand my attention. Would I refuse them? For you?  
“So, tell me,” Every cloud has coalesced around us now, black as oil and bellowing their deep shouts, “WHAT IS ONE MAN?”  
By her words, my whole world shook. Lightning struck, hard. It felt as if the whole island of Manhattan threatened to tear itself from the planet itself and catapult into space. When Storm’s words came next, they were quieter, but no less tinted with anger. “By what right does one man claim the attention of a goddess?  
“You will not kill yourself. Because if you dare to jump, my power shall kill you first.” Behind her thunder struck and the rain hit harder. “And it will be all the more painful. You will not pass gently from this world to the next. You will scream and you will writhe and you will suffer.”  
I tried to mutter something, anything, but the words wouldn’t pass my trembling lips. Make no mistake Phil, I thought, this isn’t the woman you once knew. Behind those eyes, pupiless and snow white, was not beauty, but a lifetime of that beauty being stripped away. A lifetime that you have spent writing the same trite stories and climbing the same staircase. As she flew away, and I retreated back down the building, I knew that the Storm I had invented in my head could not save me. For she was no longer real. Perhaps, she had never been.

* * *

The audacity of the man. To think he has spent so many years refusing my hope, and still hopes for me to salvage him from the wreckage of his life. Perhaps, above all else, this is why we have to live away from them. It is one thing to suffer their hatred, their petulant rage against the mundanity of their own existence. It is another to know their cloying dependence, their possessiveness. On Krakoa, I have known freedom. I have a role, a responsibility, but were I to leave it the nation would not crumble. The people would adapt and survive. Not so humans such as this, who seem to need my very life-essence as tribute to their continued existence.

  
At the very least, I hoped to be rid of him now. If I have not scared him as much of death as life, then I know not what more I can do. And it had been such a beautiful day.  
I let the clouds roll back into bountiful sunshine. I tried to feel its warmth, but found it wanting. Should it not be expected that my lesson was so quickly forgotten, if I have forgotten it also? I had shown him the infinite joy that the world can provide, the infinite hope that comes just from being alive. Yet now I can hardly feel it myself. My powers have unlimited potential, why do I only ever use them to make increasingly more destructive lightning bolts? So many years of war and anguish have left me ill equipped to deal with peacetime.  
Mayhap I should empathise with that petty man once more. For what are we without our reason for being? That I know all too well. I lived without this power, so too have I lived with more power than imaginable and still found it inadequate. Would I give it up again? Could I be something, someone, else? Would I be allowed to?  
These are the questions I pondered on my route back from the city. But I had noticed that, not far from the Krakoan gate, a seemingly quaint bookstore was enjoying a surge of popularity. Inside there were many people, more than you’d expect, for a bookstore. And yet, so few books, far less than you'd expect, for a bookstore. Still, amidst the shelves, I found one of Halloran’s most recent releases, ‘The King of Tridents’. When I went to purchase it, I thought how absurd even the act of buying becomes when you’ve been detached from it for so long. I handed over the human currency nevertheless.

  
Once back on Krakoa, I leafed through the book and found that he was right. His words were cold, prosaic and not at all how I remembered them being. I wondered if he truly had been robbed of his gift. But still the simplicity and predictability, and lack of any other duty, kept me entertained from page to page. Halloran told a fantasy story, one easily outpaced by the genre movements that had come about since his first novels. Here you would find no political intrigue, no grand mystery or deconstruction of trope and archetype. A pure adventure story, but one without an adventurer’s heart. Not a brave, bold imagining of a totally new world, but a mere cartography of one. I myself have lived through worlds that would put this fantasy to shame.

  
Something compelled me to return to the city, and its bookstore, not long after. In my first trip to this store, I was too energised to notice my fellow customers. But now I realised that for all of our triumphs, for all the safety and joy we had found on Krakoa, that the condition of mutants elsewhere had not changed. A crowd of customers instantly identify myself as unashamedly mutant as I am. Their looks are a mix of scorn and adoration, their disgust at my deviant appearance matched only by their lust for the different. So must always be the case in a culture that understands same and different to be dichotomous.

  
I made it a point to find my quarry, purchasing an old book of Halloran’s that I’d fallen in love with and promptly exiting the hostile store. With new, old book in hand, I flew back to the gateway, choosing to rise above them than squander at their level, and see in the distance that familiar building and the shadow of a figure standing atop it.  
Blood rushed, hard and fast, threatening to burst out my skin on its way to my head. How dare he? Unsatisfied with spurning my benevolence, he would refute my rage also.  
“DID I NOT TELL YOU WHAT WOULD HAPPEN IF I FOUND YOU UP HERE AGAIN, HALLORAN?” Lightning already burst from my fingertips as I flew to the figure on the ledge, pushing them back from the edge with a gale force wind. This wasn’t a show, or an act, to scare a weak man. This was a rage; pure and true. Though, perhaps, a misguided rage. “Oh.” I stopped sharply, for the figure was not Halloran, the writer, but another young, distressed man. “Were you going to jump?”  
The man was silent, and would not look me in the eye. Eventually he said, “Maybe. I… I lost my gift.”  
I sighed. “You’re not a writer too, are you?” The young man looked puzzled.  
“No,” he replied, “I used to be like you.” I raised an eyebrow. “Well, not exactly like you. I’m a mutant. I could make things. Not useful things. But pretty things. With nothing but light, if I could imagine it, I could make it,” His power sounded wonderful. “Pretty useless, huh? When they came for us. I couldn’t do anything. But it was my power, it was the only way I knew to express myself and they took it from me. I’m not nothing without it but…” He paused. The words were stuck in his throat. “Whatever is left of me, no one else can understand.”  
“Oh, child. I feel your pain. And I know that once you have soared those heights there is little that can make up for their loss. But a new day has dawned for us. On Krakoa, you need not be concerned with such troubles.”  
“Krakoa is for mutants. That’s not who I am anymore.”  
“Isn’t it? If you would rather die than live without your gift, if mutancy was your only route of self-expression, it would seem that it is all you are. I cannot undo what was done to you. But neither will I regale you with patronising tales about living without what makes you who you are. On Krakoa, you will not have this undone; but you may be able to earn it back. Perhaps, you simply need to see for yourself what a home can look like. Would you like that?”  
And, of course, he would.

  
His transport to Krakoa was soon arranged, and I accompanied him for the journey. When he would listen, I told him tales of the Crucible. He feared the trial, it shook his core in the way the steep fall from a high rise did not. A man who lived only to create dreaded to be positioned opposite a man of pure destruction. But the one thing he feared more than destruction was stasis. He would go through his trial and die. And then he would make works of mutant art the like of which had never been seen. When he was too tired to listen, I turned back to my friend Phillip Halloran, the book I’d bought and those words encased within. It was the same story as his later work. Written years before such stories would be undone and unwritten by fields of constantly warring, competitive creators. There was, in fact, only one difference between the new adventure and this one. Love. I devoured the book quickly, and felt I myself was experiencing an adventure greater than any I had actually known. So often was I brought to the verge of tears, so often did I want to dive into the fairytale and when I reached the end, I felt a total void. An emptiness. A need to go back to the beginning and read it all again.

  
If all my vaunted power could not inspire this great artisan back to words, then what could?

* * *

Years since my first encounter with Storm, and weeks since we met again, I found myself crawling around the city with even less vigour than before. I had meant to walk down an old haunt, only I found it no longer existed. The buildings, the people, they had all faded away; their drunken depravities replaced by stylish suits and Pret a Manger. Faced with this reminder, of my age, of how irrelevant my experiences are, of being a man out of time, I could not help to think of my writing again. And to think of how miserable my craft was, is to think of how miserable my life was. Life still lacked its soul, only now I had the added joy of being too terrified of a vengeful mutant goddess to seek solace from it. I dare not climb any building lest I incur her wrath, and I’m too much of a coward to seek any other way out. So I can’t recover, but neither can I escape, and even my fantasy of a sky princess swooping from the clouds to heal my woes has been forcibly stripped from me.

  
Of course, it was right then that she swooped down from the clouds once more. She fell to the sky with power and purpose: this was as much the goddess as the woman. I flinched at her arrival, but our eyes met, and they effaced kindness. On this occasion, I managed to stammer out some speech, “You’re not going to electrocute me for being miserable, are you?”  
“No, my friend. I had hoped, instead, we might be able to get some coffee.”  
This came as a surprise, though an admittedly pleasant one. “Coffee? Isn’t that a bit…” Pedestrian? “...human?” I said.  
“Perhaps. But I was under the impression that caffeine ran through a writer’s veins,” She cocked her head. “And you’re looking somewhat pale.”  
“Ha! Fine, then.” So, we walked into a nearby cafe as if we were longtime friends. It was probably a chain of some sort, so clean and uniform in design, though I didn’t recognise any logo. I could have sworn it used to sell porno, but that was another shop, in another city, in another time.

  
“I wanted to apologise,” Storm said, once we had sat with our drinks. The words seemed strange to come from the mouth of such a higher being. Frankly, I never felt that she needed to do anything so prosaic as apologise. “I wasn’t angry at you… I was angry at you. But mostly I was angry with myself, and my failings.”  
“Well, I wouldn’t feel too bad about it. It worked after all.” Sure I was too scared to live, but too scared to die also. Better to be trapped in purgatory than to burn in Hell, I supposed.  
Storm smiled. “I’m afraid it might not have. I had meant to save your life, not condemn you to it.” She sipped from her mug. I couldn’t help but feel that she had brought the whole room to a chill, just so the warm drink could soothe us that much more. “I was hoping I could tell you something about when I lost my gifts.”  
“So long as it isn’t a better story than one of mine, feel free.”  
“It’s no adventure story. Rather the opposite. I lost my powers, yes, but I also remember losing hours to just motioning my fingers. I’d flex them, I’d wiggle them, I’d contort them into strange configurations. I was always hoping that some sliver of lightning would streak out. Sometimes I could swear that I felt a buzz rush along my nerves, as if my powers were just words stuck on my tongue, but I would inevitably find nothing there. I would stand on the roof, hoping to catch a wind and activate some hidden mechanism in my brain that would let me easily recover what I had lost. I’d spend long, cold nights, under constant rainfall, on the off chance that I might be able to stop its flow.  
“To attempt to write, when you have lost the ability to do so, is just as futile.”

  
Suddenly, the swirls in the foam of my coffee seemed the most interesting thing in the world.  
“How did you get them back? Your powers?” I asked.  
“You’ve missed my point, Phil. I was deprived of my gifts, but, still, I took on the mantle of leadership, and found purpose again at the front of the X-Men. And soon my powers would be returned to me. But, until then, I lived. I fought. You are already doing what you must. Only you hate yourself for failing to be something that you are not. I lead. That is what I do. You write. That is what you do. But it is not your gift. Your gift, Phil, is to love and to believe in ways no one else can. I have read your stories and felt your love and know this to be true. You may have lost that gift. But one day it will return, and the world will be better for it.  
“My friend, you look at a loss.”  
I had looked back up at her while she spoke. I may have been brought to tears by the beauty; both of the kindness of the words and of the woman speaking them.  
“I am just amazed. As I always am, by you. Why do you look out for me so? This city, this country isn’t your home. Me and mine are not yours. And you have sought higher adventures than I have ever told, fought greater trials and saved a world which can never be grateful enough. So why offer up your time and care to me? Why one man?”  
“Because, Philip Halloran, you are my friend. And I have saved worlds it is true. I cannot but help to feel this is not worthwhile, unless occasionally I can save people.”


End file.
